been deserted, owing to their murderous attacks on the shepherds and the
stockhuts, will now be available, and a very sensible relief will be
afforded to the flocks of sheep that had been withdrawn from them, and
pent up on inadequate ranges of pasture--a circumstance which indeed has
tended materially to impoverish the flocks and keep up the price of
butcher's meat.

The dogs which these poor people have nursed and bred up in order to
assist them in hunting the kangaroo, have latterly become so numerous and
wild as to be a very serious and alarming nuisance to the settlers,
committing on many farms nightly ravages on their flocks. In the
neighbourhood of Benlomond they are particularly troublesome, and
are so wild and savage as to set even men at defiance. Notwithstanding
this, however, the numbers of the kangaroo seem daily and rapidly to
increase. Whether this arises from the latterly diminished slaughter among
them, owing to the decrease of the blacks who formerly fed upon them, or
from the effects of the Dog Act, which induced many to destroy their dogs
and to desist from the chase, or from the relish which the animal itself
has acquired for the corn and other artificial food it finds upon the
cultivated farms, we cannot say, but certain it is, that not only patches,
but whole acres of corn in many situations are this year destroyed by
their nightly inroads, coming as they do in droves of fifties and hundreds.
As an instance we may mention that on Mr. Gunn's farm at the Coal River
alone, a fine field of five acres of wheat has lately been completely
eaten down by them. Many persons are in consequence falling on the
expedient of catching them in wires and pitfalls in order to diminish them.

The ravages committed by the opossums, in like manner, are almost equally
ruinous to the hopes of the farmer, in addition to the attacks of
bandicoots, kangaroo rats, and the other almost innumerable (and certainly